What You Should Watch Tuesday Night

One of the greatest strengths of “The Americans” is the show’s internal memory: Small characters reappear, threads of story lines re-emerge after several episodes, and whatever annoyed a character a few seasons ago is probably still rattling around in his or her brain now. In this fifth-season premiere, “The Americans” continues apace, picking up not long after where Season 4 left off, with Paige growing ever closer to Stan Beeman’s son but also still reeling from watching her mother kill someone.

Most “greatest of the great” dramas have a central thematic question that guides their orbit over the years, and for “The Americans,” that question is, “How do I know something is true?” That’s a little different than wondering about the nature of truth broadly — here the question has a different answer for each character, based on a complicated equation of intimacy, loyalty, danger, pain, predictability and support. (Add it to your Watchlist.)

‘The Partner,’ 10 p.m., CNBC

The series “The Profit” is about Marcus Lemonis investing in and rehabilitating small businesses — in shockingly decent, thoughtful ways, without the phoniness or exploitation endemic to most reality television.

This spinoff is less wholesome. It’s an “Apprentice”-style series in which 10 entrepreneurs compete to become Lemonis’s “partner.” The series is only five episodes long, and the eliminations are swift, but “The Partner” feels contrived in a way “The Profit” does not (at least in its first two seasons). I like “The Profit” enough to be a Lemonis completist at this point, but I feel like a skeptical judge on “Law & Order,” squinting my eyes and saying, “I hope this is going somewhere, Mr. McCoy — and fast.”